I remember particularly the figure of Lord Adisham.  He came to the bungalow a day before the others, because he was Melmount’s personal friend.  Let me describe this statesman to you, this one of the fifteen men who made the last war.  He was the youngest member of the Government, and an altogether pleasant and sunny man of forty.  He had a clear profile to his clean gray face, a smiling eye, a friendly, careful voice upon his thin, clean-shaven lips, an easy disabusing manner.  He had the perfect quality of a man who had fallen easily into a place prepared for him.  He had the temperament of what we used to call a philosopher—­an indifferent, that is to say.  The Change had caught him at his week-end recreation, fly-fishing; and, indeed, he said, I remember, that he recovered to find himself with his head within a yard of the water’s brim.  In times of crisis Lord Adisham invariably went fly-fishing at the week-end to keep his mind in tone, and when there was no crisis then there was nothing he liked so much to do as fly-fishing, and so, of course, as there was nothing to prevent it, he fished.  He came resolved, among other things, to give up fly-fishing altogether.  I was present when he came to Melmount, and heard him say as much; and by a more naive route it was evident that he had arrived at the same scheme of intention as my master.  I left them to talk, but afterward I came back to take down their long telegrams to their coming colleagues.  He was, no doubt, as profoundly affected as Melmount by the Change, but his tricks of civility and irony and acceptable humor had survived the Change, and he expressed his altered attitude, his expanded emotions, in a quaint modification of the old-time man-of-the-world style, with excessive moderation, with a trained horror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.

These fifteen men who ruled the British Empire were curiously unlike anything I had expected, and I watched them intently whenever my services were not in request.  They made a peculiar class at that time, these English politicians and statesmen, a class that has now completely passed away.  In some respects they were unlike the statesmen of any other region of the world, and I do not find that any really adequate account remains of them. . . .  Perhaps you are a reader of the old books.  If so, you will find them rendered with a note of hostile exaggeration by Dickens in “Bleak House,” with a mingling of gross flattery and keen ridicule by Disraeli, who ruled among them accidentally by misunderstanding them and pleasing the court, and all their assumptions are set forth, portentously, perhaps, but truthfully, so far as people of the “permanent official” class saw them, in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward.  All these books are still in this world and at the disposal of the curious, and in addition the philosopher Bagehot and the picturesque historian Macaulay give something of their method of thinking, the novelist Thackeray skirts the seamy side of their social life, and there are some good passages of irony, personal descriptions, and reminiscence to be found in the “Twentieth Century Garner” from the pens of such writers, for example, as Sidney Low.  But a picture of them as a whole is wanting.  Then they were too near and too great; now, very rapidly, they have become incomprehensible.